Must Have Social Media Tools for 2017

Must Have Social Media Tools for 2018

As more and more people create personal and professional profiles on social networking sites, there’s simply no denying the importance of social media for brand promotion and business growth.

But because marketing professionals contend with a plethora of marketing activities aside from interacting with customers on social media, we’ve compiled a list of social media productivity tools you should check out in 2018, if you haven’t already.

This post tackles 30 of the top social media tools, what they’re for, some pricing details, and their pros and cons. Let’s dig right in.

1. AddThis

Best known for: Content distribution, tracking, and analysis

AddThis is a social sharing and engagement tool found on many websites. It comes with share and follow buttons to easily distribute your content, boost your social media presence, and grow your audience. Aside from website marketing, AddThis provides valuable data on audience behavior: social engagement, number of people sharing your content, and where traffic comes from.

Pricing

AddThis Basic is free. Paid plans start at $10 per month.

Pros

  • Share buttons for one-click sharing of content to various social media channels
  • Follow buttons for quick and easy audience building
  • Provides insights on browser type, browser language, date and time of a user’s visit to your website, and traffic referrers
  • Aggregates the number of clicks a shared link generates
  • Responsive and works with any device type
  • Related Posts feature to keep readers glued to your site’s content
  • Easy-to-install plugin for WordPress
  • Available browser extensions: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, plus a bookmarklet if you need more sharing options

Cons

  • Inability to turn off the AddThis branding even on Pro subscriptions
  • May require some tweaking at the outset to properly work

2. Buffer

Best known for: Automated republishing and content scheduling

Buffer is a social media management tool that lets users schedule and publish content on the major social networks, as well as measure the impact of their marketing efforts from one centralized dashboard.

Pricing

For individual plans, a free version with limited features is available. The paid version costs $10 per month. Team and agency plans start at $99.

Pros

  • Social media scheduling and publishing in one dashboard
  • Includes link shortening and tracking, social analytics, and Pablo, Buffer’s proprietary image creator
  • Can add RSS feeds from blogs
  • Works with desktops, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices
  • Includes browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox for easier posting and scheduling

Cons

  • Doesn’t track social mentions
  • Can’t view your Twitter feed or interact with followers directly from the dashboard
  • Free account doesn’t support Pinterest

3. Bundle Post

Best known for: Hashtag tracking and content curation

Bundle Post is a social media management tool that tracks hashtags and curates content from numerous sources, including Google Alerts, RSS, and other feeds, allowing you to choose from the latest and most relevant content to send out to your audience. It lets you schedule social content in bulk and create repository folders for your marketing messages, which you can also include in your scheduled posts.

Pricing

Bundle Post plans start at $19.99 per month. A free 30-day trial where you get to test drive the Pro plan (costs $100 per month) is available.

Pros

  • Allows the creation of folders for each client or campaign
  • Lets users add single time slots for posting or specify posting intervals to maintain complete control over their scheduled posts
  • Has a time-saving #FollowFriday feature that helps you figure out what to say in your posts or who to mention
  • Integrates with Hootsuite
  • Offers a Chrome extension

Cons

Tech support may be limited to tutorials only for certain plans

4. ClickToTweet

Best known for: One-click content sharing and analytics

ClickToTweet is a Twitter app that lets you create tweetable links you can then embed on your website, email messages, or press releases. It comes with features that make promoting, sharing, and tracking your content easier.

Pricing

ClickToTweet paid plans start at $4.97 monthly. Other plans are Expert at $49.70 per year, and the Enterprise plan at $499 per year. A free ClickToTweet plan is also available.

Pros

  • Tweetable links generation for easier content sharing
  • Central dashboard for all your links
  • Analytics for click activities on your links
  • Click mapping so you know where people clicking on your links are located in the world
  • Suggested users feature to increase followers
  • URL shortener to redirect all your links
  • ClickToTweet WordPress plugin available

Cons

  • No full support for embedding images, just a workaround
  • Free plan only includes five links

5. ContentGems

ContentGems homepage

Best known for: Content discovery and distribution

ContentGems is a content discovery engine that scans thousands of online content from trusted sources, helping marketers automatically find timely and relevant content for distribution to their audience on various channels: social media, email newsletters, website, portals/intranets, or mobile app. This, in turn, allows them to attract more qualified traffic to their sites and build thought leadership for the company.

Pricing

Depending on the package you choose, paid plans cost $99 per month (Business) and $199 per month (Agencies). A free plan with limited features is likewise available.

Pros

  • Monitors leading blog and news sites for top-rated content, which you can further cherry-pick or automatically stream to your followers
  • Gives users immediate access to hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds
  • Sends out weekly or daily email digests
  • Comes with Twitter filters to weed out sub-par content
  • Lets you build customized feed bundles
  • Allows the usage of custom keywords and content filtering by media type and social signals
  • Offers a developer API for customized data sharing between apps
  • Works with a range of third-party platforms, such as MailChimp, Slack, Buffer, Hootsuite, Feedly, Campaign Monitor, and Sendible

Cons

  • Mainly built for content discovery and distribution, no advanced social media management capabilities
  • Advanced features come at a cost that may be steep for small businesses or startups

6. EpicBeat

EpicBeat homepage

Best known for: Content discovery and analysis

EpicBeat is a social media software system that assists marketers with content, influencers, and trend discovery.

Pricing

EpicBeat costs $49 per month or $490 per year. A 14-day free trial is available.

Pros

  • Available features: saved searches, downloadable data, real-time alerts, and multiple users
  • Helps businesses find influencers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, SoundCloud, and SlideShare
  • Provides insights such as best-performing content types and formats, top authors and domains, trending themes, comprehensive sentiment analysis, and ideal posting times across platforms
  • Various filter options for content refinement
  • Comes with a curation API for WordPress blogs

Cons

  • Allows use of the tool without signing up but will only grant you access to Twitter influencers

7. Everypost

Everypost homepage

Best known for: Content curation and social media publishing

Everypost is an all-in-one social media publishing tool that simplifies content curation and maintaining control over your social media pages. Supported platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

Pricing

Everypost has a free option plus four different paid tiers, which start at at $9.99 per month.

Pros

  • Team collaboration and role management
  • Visual content curation from various social media sources including Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and RSS feeds
  • Post scheduling and customization to suit the needs of each platform’s audience
  • Social analytics tools for building granular, platform-specific reports
  • Compatibility with Android and iOS devices
  • Automatic syncing of personal contacts to Everypost
  • Twitter mentions monitoring and location activation
  • Filters and image manipulation

Cons

Free version is limited to one account per channel and doesn’t support team management

8. Google Trends

Best known for: Trends tracking and market research

Google Trends is a forecasting and historical analysis tool that aids with market research and web user behavior tracking. It provides interest trends over time for certain keyword searches.

Pricing

Google Trends is a free service.

Pros

  • Shows insights into interest spikes for relevant terms
  • Can be used to research on practically anything of interest to you, including predicting economic indicators
  • Aside from time trends, also renders rising interest reports (related terms not in the top 10 but show sustained increase and should be noticed)
  • Contains filters to narrow search results: location filter, category filter, time span filter, and type of search filter

Cons

  • Minimum traffic requirement for your website to be featured
  • Data may contain inaccuracies
  • Better to use Google Analytics over Google Trends if you want accurate data on your website

9. Hashtagify.me

Best known for: Hashtag discovery and influencer marketing

Hashtagify.me is a Twitter hashtag search and discovery tool that lets you find the best hashtags to expand your social media reach. It also helps you pinpoint the right influencers to amplify your message.

Pricing

Hashtagify offers a free account. Pro plans start at $9.99 per month. If you pay annually, you get two months free.

Pros

  • Has a Research Assistant feature that analyzes your Twitter accounts to give you the best hashtag recommendations, up to 30 related hashtags
  • Lets you find hashtags from competitors and influencers
  • HashSmart Filter feature automatically filters out generic and spammy hashtags
  • Drills down to individual tweets to measure hashtag influence
  • Comes with analytics and in-depth reports that detail the hashtag’s usage patterns
  • Shows you a live stream of the public posts using the hashtag

Cons

  • Support for Instagram only available to Business and Enterprise accounts
  • Requires credit card information to start using the free trial

10. Hootsuite

Hootsuite homepage

Best known for: Social media management in one place

Hootsuite is a time-saving social media and analytics app that lets users manage all of their social profiles from a single location. It allows you to discover and schedule social content, identify influencers, and connect with customers and social media followers faster.

Pricing

A paid one-user plan starts at $19 per month. For teams and businesses, multi-user subscriptions start at $99 per month. A free and limited single-user plan is likewise available.

Pros

  • Clean, easy-to-use dashboard
  • Offers a complete set of social media management tools for scheduling, content curation, analytics, monitoring, team management, and contests/sweepstakes hosting
  • Also functions as helpdesk for social media teams, allowing businesses to protect their reputation straight from the app
  • Integrates with 250+ business apps
  • Works with the following mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android

Cons

  • Supports a limited number of URL shorteners
  • Adding more users and advanced features can be very expensive for small businesses

11. IFTTT

IFTTT homepage

Best known for: Integration of otherwise disparate apps

Short for “if this, then that,” IFTTT is more than just a social media management tool. It’s a web-based task automation app that performs actions triggered by conditional statements or applets. For IFTTT to work, you need a channel, a recipe, and an action.

For example, if you’re tagged in an Instagram photo, IFTTT can automatically download the photo to Google Drive.

Pricing

IFTTT can be used totally free. But if you want to publish a service and embed it in your own apps or website, that will cost you $199 per month. For custom options and services for your brand, Partner Plus starts at $499 per month.

Pros

  • Connects disparate services without learning how to code
  • Hundreds of service combinations you can use upon signup
  • Works seamlessly between desktop and mobile devices
  • Can build your own recipe if you don’t find what you need
  • Totally free to use

Cons

  • Can only combine two services at a time
  • Can result in double postings on your social accounts if you go crazy with your combinations

12. Keyhole

Keyhole homepage

Best known for: Hashtag tracking and keyword analysis

Keyhole is a hashtag analytics and social media marketing tool that works with the major social networks: Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Keyhole tracks data from your account, analyzes generated reports, and gives out suggestions on how to better optimize your social media marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Keyhole offers several pricing tiers: Professional ($165 per month), Team ($349 per month), Corporate ($599 per month), Agency ($999 per month), and Enterprise (call their sales team for custom pricing). Although there are no yearly commitments, Keyhole offers discounts on one- and two-year prepayments.

You can also test-drive the app for three days for free.

Pros

  • Carries a suite of social media marketing features: hashtag and keyword analytics, influencer marketing, competitor tracking, sentiment analysis, demographic analysis, locations heatmap, live streams, historical data reports, and automated reporting
  • Analytics for both brand mentions and hashtags
  • Embed widgets available for your website or blog
  • Tracks which devices users commonly post with
  • Customized alert notifications via email
  • Reports that are exportable to Excel and similar software tools

Cons

  • In-depth social media analytics and reporting features limited to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
  • May be pricey for small businesses and startups

13. MeetEdgar

Meetedgar homepage

Best known for: Content scheduling and amplification

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool that ensures your posts and updates get the most attention from your fans, followers, and connections. MeetEdgar doesn’t just schedule your posts and track their performance, it also allows you to build a library of social media updates that you can use over and over again.

Pricing

MeetEdgar pricing is at $49 per month. A free 14-day trial is offered.

Pros

  • Automatically reshares evergreen content
  • Builds a queue of updates for sharing across your different social networks
  • Supports unlimited content in your library
  • Lets you assign expiration dates to seasonal content
  • Pulls content from RSS feeds
  • Allows category-based scheduling for different types of posts
  • Supported URL shorteners: Rebrandly and Edgar’s proprietary custom link shortener
  • Offers a Chrome extension and bookmarklet
  • Provides statistics to better increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts

Cons

  • Only supports Twitter, Facebook (profiles, groups, pages), and Linkedin (profiles, company pages)
  • No dedicated plugin for Firefox or Safari
  • Doesn’t support retweeting or commenting on content in-app

14. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach homepage

Best known for: Influencer research, content discovery, and outreach automation

Ninja Outreach is primarily an influencer marketing tool, but it goes way beyond that. It can also be used for lead generation, content promotion, Twitter and Instagram prospecting, list management, content research, blogger outreach, and link building.

Pricing

You need to schedule a demo or call their sales department to get pricing information.

Pros

  • Gives you immediate access to thousands, if not millions, of influencers in your industry
  • Saves you tons of time on blogger prospecting and outreach
  • All your contacts, notes, email history, and RSS feeds in one place
  • Easy clients and campaign segmentation using relevant keywords
  • Supports team management and collaboration
  • Carries SEO, location, special posts, and social filters for more targeted results
  • Has customizable built-in outreach templates
  • Includes a Chrome extension

Cons

  • We can be a little biased about Ninja Outreach. It’s our baby, after all. We work hard to deliver the best possible influencer marketing solution for you, but if there’s anything at all that bothers you about the software, let us know, and we’ll do our utmost to get that fixed.

15. Oktopost

Oktapost Homepage

Best known for: Social publishing and lead management

Oktopost is a social media management platform for B2B marketers. It helps with lead generation, lead tracking and analysis, social publishing, social listening and engagement, and content curation.

Pricing

Oktopost pricing depends on the package your company needs. Please contact their sales department for custom pricing.

Pros

  • Comes with a suite of social publishing features: campaign categorization, editorial calendar, content pipeline, publishing automation, and a mobile app for Android and iOS devices
  • Social analytics feature that tracks acquisition and lead attribution, audience growth, social engagement, and content performance
  • Data that can be exported to Excel or any business intelligence solution
  • Supports the use of custom RSS feeds for content discovery
  • Live streams to monitor keywords, company pages, mentions, customer feedback, and competitor activities
  • Promotes employee advocacy and thought leadership for social amplification
  • Supports team management and collaboration
  • Upholds data security through role-based user controls

Cons

  • Because it’s feature-rich, may take some getting used to
  • Integration with Twitter Insights (or other marketing automation software) is a separate purchase

16. Pocket

Pocket Homepage

Best known for: “Save for later” content curation

Pocket is a content curation tool that allows users to save content for later viewing. It offers different ways to save: via email, your web browser, or from 1,500 connected apps, such as Twitter, Digg, and Flipboard.

Pricing

You can use Pocket for free. However, if you want it ad-free or need access to more features, such as a permanent library of the webpages and articles you save (even when they’re deleted from the web entirely), full-text search, customized reading experience, and suggested tags, Pocket Premium costs $4.99 per month, or $44.99 per year.

Pros

  • Comes with a clean, minimalistic, and user-friendly interface
  • Allows offline viewing of saved content
  • Lets users send links to [email protected] if the app they use doesn’t support auto-saving to Pocket
  • Tagging system for content categorization and easy retrieval
  • Content recommendation based on the content you save
  • Premium plan supports multiple languages, including English, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish
  • Integrates with 1,500+ apps
  • Has native apps for Androids, iPhones, and iPads; also works with Kobo e-readers, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry devices
  • Offers extensions for the major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera

Cons

  • List of user-created applications on the website not updated
  • Articles won’t be available offline if you’ve closed Pocket down before full download is complete
  • Free account removes copies of archived items from the device

17. Post Planner

Best known for: Content discovery and trends tracking

Post Planner is a content discovery tool that assists social media managers with finding the right content using keywords, hashtags, and industry recommendations. The app also measures content performance through a five-star rating system so you can cherry-pick the content to showcase to your target audience.

Pricing

Post Planner offers five subscription plans, aside from a free-for-life basic version and a custom package for organizations requiring unlimited features. Paid plans start at $3 per month (Starter plan), if billed annually.

Pros

  • Lets you add your own content, which is then scored for virality
  • Allows posting to Facebook groups that you manage
  • Supports sharing and uploading of photos
  • Automatically adds evergreen content back to plan rotation
  • Star rating system to predict content performance – more stars, better content performance
  • Automates publishing from RSS feeds

Cons

  • Works with Facebook and Twitter only
  • No free trial for the paid options
  • No native mobile app yet

18. RightTag

Best known for: Hashtag analysis and optimization

RiteTag is a hashtag optimization tool that helps users find the right hashtags for their social media campaigns. Using real-time engagement data, it provides instant feedback on your hashtags and identifies those that will generate good results.

Pricing

The pricing scheme for RightTag is simple and straightforward: $49 per year. A seven-day free trial is available.

Pros

  • Visibly warns you of problematic hashtags through color coding
  • Provides granular statistics on your chosen hashtag, such as unique tweets per hour, retweets per hour, hashtag exposure per hour, tweets with images, tweets with links, and tweets with mentions
  • Provides statistics on recommended hashtags, making it easy to pick out the most promising ones
  • Lists down which hashtags not to use
  • Available browser extensions: Chrome and Firefox
  • Available mobile apps: Android and iOS

Cons

  • Exclusively used for hashtag optimization only

19. Simply Measured

Best known for: Social listening and analytics

Simply Measured is a social listening tool that aids with brand reputation management. It also analyzes metrics across the different social networks, giving social media managers an in-depth look into their social media activities.

Pricing

Pricing for a Simply Measured subscription is not available on their website. Schedule a demo or call their sales department for more information.

Pros

  • Aggregation and analysis of social media data in one location
  • Supports the major social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Pinterest
  • Other solutions offered aside from social listening and analysis: conversion and content share tracking
  • Reports that can be generated in a variety of formats: Excel, Word, or PowerPoint
  • Helps improve SEO and tracks traffic generated via AdWords
  • Has built-in integrations with Tableau
  • Offers a social analytics API to analyze your data however you want it analyzed
  • Gathers data from Google Analytics
  • Provides free reports for a sampling of the data it generates, such as Twitter follower report,
  • Facebook fan page report, Facebook content analysis, Instagram user report, Vine tweet analysis, and social traffic report

Cons

  • Custom reporting may not be available for all users
  • Because it’s feature-rich, may take a little getting used to

20. Social Mention

Best known for: Social listening and reputation management

Social Mention is a social listening tool that lets businesses track and monitor the conversations around their brands. It can be used for reputation management and for research into what piques the interest of your target market.

Pricing

Social Mention can be used for free. There are review channels, however, that peg the price per user per month anywhere from $20 to $29. Social Mention doesn’t publicly provide such data. Please contact them for more information.

Pros

  • Simple and straightforward usage: input your query into the toolbar and specify the channel/s you want the app to perform a search on
  • Covers 100+ social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and Google
  • Functions as a user-generated content aggregator, as well as a search and analysis platform
  • Carries a third-party API for companies that want to stream real-time social media data into the applications they already use
  • Allows the setup of daily social media alerts

Cons

  • Doesn’t offer advanced filtering options as most social media management tools do

21. Socialert

Best known for: Hashtag tracking and reputation management

Socialert makes hashtag tracking simpler and easier. The app, however, is more than just that. It also carries features and tools that perform brand monitoring, influencer marketing, and Twitter analytics.

Pricing

Socialert offers multiple subscription plans: Starter ($9.95 per month), Professional ($29.95 per month), Enterprise ($49.95 per month), and Corporate ($99.95 per month). A free three-day trial is likewise available.

Pros

  • Multiple functionalities in one platform: brand monitoring, hashtag tracking, influencer marketing, and Twitter analytics
  • Allows monitoring of every related keyword to amplify your brand’s reach
  • Supports competitor analysis by helping you uncover their influencers, viral content, customers, and trending hashtags
  • Tracks hashtag mentions and usage
  • Provides top tweets, hashtags, and links
  • Allows social media managers to directly communicate with their audience from the dashboard
  • Has noise-reducing filters that let you hone in on the data that matter

Cons

  • Mainly focused on Twitter

22. SocialOomph

Best known for: Content discovery and posts scheduling

SocialOomph is a social media management and productivity app that lets you schedule posts, find people to follow, and monitor activities in your different networks from one centralized dashboard.

Pricing

A free account for Twitter-only management can accommodate up to five different profiles. If you need to monitor more than five, SocialOomph Twitter Unlimited costs $6.97 once every two weeks. SocialOomph Professional, on the other hand, costs $17.97 once every two weeks.

Pros

  • Supported social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Plurk
  • Supports URL shortening and keywords tracking
  • Allows usage of RSS feeds to create updates
  • Supports unlimited accounts
  • Supports tweeting via email

Cons

  • Additional fees for auto-DM and follow-back features
  • Free account covers Twitter only

23. Sprout Social

Best known for: Social media marketing and analytics

Sprout Social offers a host of social media management tools to facilitate the way brands communicate with their customers. It carries features that allows individual users and teams to manage their messages in one place, schedule and publish posts, collaborate on content via a shared content calendar, and unlock valuable social media insights through in-depth analytics.

Pricing

Sprout Social offers three pricing tiers: Premium at $99 per user per month, Corporate at $149 per user per month, and Enterprise at $249 per user per month. Free 30-day trials are available for all plans.

Pros

  • Clean and intuitive user interface
  • Detailed reporting
  • Solutions offered: smart inbox, post scheduling and publishing, keyword and location monitoring, a shared content calendar, task management and social CRM, in-depth reports, trends and engagement reports, competitive benchmark reporting, custom URL tracking, and advanced keyword listening
  • Supports multiple account management
  • Single-stream inbox for easier engagement with customers
  • Proprietary analytics tools to monitor and measure individual and team performance against responsiveness and engagement targets
  • Integrates with Google Analytics
  • Available apps: web app, browser plugin, Android, iPad and iOS apps

Cons

  • Doesn’t connect with Pinterest
  • Cost on the high side to include an entire team
  • Advanced features only available to higher-priced subscription packages

24. Tagboard

Best known for: Hashtag tracking and content publishing

Tagboard is not your ordinary hashtag tracker. While it does use hashtags to aggregate data from the various social media networks in real time, the app also embeds, reposts, and broadcasts content on various display screens.

Pricing

Tagboard offers two pricing categories: Social Media Displays and Digital + Web Only. The Starter plan for social media displays costs $500 per event, while Starter Digital for digital and web use only starts at $99 monthly, if billed annually.

Pros

  • Carries an intuitive, user-friendly interface
  • Allows content curation through hashtags
  • Supports sharing of content to your live audience at events such as conferences or sports arenas
  • Has filters for blocking negative or offensive posts
  • Supports retweeting and commenting from the Tagboard account
  • Automatic notifications for social media users who get featured
  • Comes with plugins for Chrome, Hootsuite, and Eventbrite

Cons

  • Social media display packages are on the pricey side
  • Valuable features come at an extra cost

25. Talkwalker

Best known for: Social media listening and analytics

Talkwalker does more than social listening, influencer identification, and hashtag tracking. In all, it’s an online reputation management system that enables businesses to monitor what people are saying about their brands and take immediate action where necessary.

Pricing

Talkwalker plans start at $8,400 yearly (or $700 per month). A seven-day free trial is offered.

Pros

  • Social listening across 10+ social networks, 150 million websites, and in 187 languages automatically translated in-platform
  • Carries a proprietary image recognition technology, allowing users to analyze both images and text in social posts
  • Analytics features include virality map to replicate viral campaigns, trending score to pinpoint trends, use case dashboards, in-depth social channel analytics, and smart theme detection for issue identification
  • Sentiment analysis available in 25 languages
  • Instant and automatic alerts
  • Fully customizable crisis dashboards
  • Time-lapse visuals for trend comparison and measurement
  • Integrates with third-party apps such as Hootsuite and Tableau

Cons

  • Too pricey for startups and small businesses
  • Lacks the ability to directly publish to social media

26. Tweet Binder

Best known for: Social media tracking and analysis

Tweet Binder is a social media tracking tool that allows users to classify, analyze, and optimize their Twitter and Instagram content for better campaign results. Aside from the ability to track hashtags and keywords, the app has features that showcases stats in just a click, which, in turn, helps social media managers understand their content’s performance in real time.

Pricing

Tweet Binder offers three subscription packages: Twitter Plan (€150 per month), Twitter and Instagram Plan (€310 per month), and Instagram Plan (€210 per month).

Pros

  • Categorizes tweets or topics into binders for stats comparison between binders
  • Carries an analytics suite to know and measure the reach and impact of your Twitter campaigns
  • Can be used to integrate Twitter on customized “tweet walls” to show tweets, images, leaderboards, and rankings to your audience in real time
  • Creates customized microsites for your campaigns and events
  • Allows exportation of reports to Excel

Cons

  • Price may be on the steep side for small businesses and startups
  • Can only store up to 6,000 tweets from the last seven days and up to 35,000 tweets per month for real-time reports

27. TweetDeck

Best known for: Twitter marketing and monitoring

An app by Twitter for Twitter users, TweetDeck is a social media management tool that monitors how users interact with the content posted on your different accounts. It gives you an at-a-glance view of your mentions, messages, notifications, and real-time activity in your network.

Pricing

TweetDeck is absolutely free to use.

Pros

  • Supports link shortening
  • Lets you set up keyboard shortcuts and configurable alerts
  • Allows tweet scheduling
  • 15 different column types that can be added to or deleted from your timeline anytime
  • Easily customizable look and feel
  • Tweet Grid, which basically is a collection of tweets, that can be customized and embedded on your website
  • Supports multiple users and team management

Cons

  • Shortened URLs that cannot be customized
  • Twitter-only application

28. Viraltag

Best known for: Social media publishing and analytics

Viraltag is a multi-featured social media management and analytics tool that allows social media professionals to manage multiple social networks, schedule unlimited posts and updates, reuse evergreen content, collaborate with teams, and track and measure performance from one dashboard.

Pricing

Subscription packages start at $24 per month, if billed annually. Free 14-day trials are available.

Pros

  • Schedules multiple shares for a single post over different time periods
  • Lets users customize their messages to suit specific platforms’ audiences
  • Supports sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram
  • Carries a built-in image editor
  • Supports uploading of multiple images at once
  • Integrates with Google Drive and Dropbox for uploading, editing, and scheduling of content in bulk
  • Provides the ability to add multiple RSS feeds, Flickr, and Instagram accounts for content curation
  • Has a Chrome extension and bookmarklet
  • Allows users to pin on multiple Pinterest accounts and boards at once
  • Supports URL shortening

Cons

  • Requires manual setup of each day’s schedule
  • URL shortening may not automatically work across the board, such as on Facebook image posts with a URL in the description

29. Cyfe

Social Media Tools 2017- Cyfe

Cyfe is a dashboard app that monitors not just how your company fares on social media but in other aspects as well. It provides prebuilt widgets so you can start monitoring your social media and other KPIs immediately after signup.

Pricing

Cyfe Premium costs $19 per month ($14 per month for annual payments). Cyfe can also be used for free.

Pros

  • Offers unlimited widgets and dashboards
  • Data can be exported in various formats: PNG, PDF, JPEG, and CSV
  • Archives data older than 30 days – meaning, you never lose it
  • Allows you to showcase your data on any screen type
  • Lets you customize your data sources using its Push API and present your data however you want via custom widgets
  • Gives you the ability to share read-only URLs to the public
  • Offers prebuilt integrations with a number of third-party apps, such as Salesforce, Google AdWords, MailChimp, Freshbooks, Facebook, WordPress, YouTube, PayPal, Amazon Web Services, GoToWebinar, Constant Contact, Shopify, Stripe, Bing Ads, Vimeo, and many more

Cons

  • Offers limited reporting options for certain connections
  • Some reports may not be customizable
  • Limited panel design options

30. Digimind Social

Social Media Tools 2017- Digimind

Digimind Social is a social media monitoring tool that allows marketers to listen to what people are saying about their brand. To help with brand reputation and management, real-time brand sentiment is analyzed across millions of sources that include social media and top publications.

Pricing

Pricing depends on the monitoring features you need for your business. Contact their sales team for more details.

Pros

  • Helps you protect your company’s overall brand health
  • Lets you monitor your content’s performance through Digimind’s built-in social analytics feature
  • Allows you to track what people are saying about your company, products, services, your competitors, and even any topic that interests you
  • Provides the intelligence data you need to better engage with your target audience
  • Helps you tweak and improve your marketing strategy
  • Integrates with Hootsuite

Cons

  • May require some tech support at setup
  • Social data from some sources may be limited

31. PromoRepublic

Best known for: Content creation, promotion, and automation.

Promo Republic is designed to help small businesses minimize their social media efforts with an extremely user-friendly tool. It features a graphic editor tool for you to create thumb-stopping visual posts, followed by content promotion ideas you can schedule with a click. And if creating and curating your own content takes up too much time, Promo Republic even has the option for you to go on autopilot – suggesting relevant content for you on a daily basis.

Pricing:

7-day free trial. Paid plan starts at $9 per month.

Pros

  • Amazing tool for small businesses to understand the type of content to post
  • Autopilot: daily post ideas and inspirations
  • Seamless integration to all social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn
  • Integration with top industry apps such as Hubspot and Buffer
  • Great UI/UX: easy to use, easy to navigate

Cons

  • You can only use pre-built templates; you can’t create your own.
  • Limited flexibility in graphic editor; you can’t change the font colours of individual words/letters in the same sentence.
  • Non-responsive canvas. If you chose a Facebook pre-built template and shared the image on Instagram, the dimensions stay the same.

32. Design Wizard

Best known for: Being an effortless way to create high-quality visuals with thousands of templates and personalised images.

Design Wizard is as its name says: a wizard in helping you create top-notch visual contents with its thousands of templates and over 1 million personalised images without the effort or the time necessary. It’s easy to use and lets you create a stunning graphic – creative genius or otherwise.

Pricing

Design Wizard is free to use. They do have a paid plan starting at $9.99 per month.

Pros

  • Access to over 1.2 million curated images.
  • Ability to customise colour palettes and fonts.
  • Allows you to share your images instantly.
  • Responsive resizing for your designs
  • You can create folders of your favourite images.
  • Downloadable images with free preview
  • A simple use of licensing plan.
  • Database of over 120 free fonts.

Cons

  • System is still a little slow
  • Limited space to store uploaded photos

Final word

There you have it – the top 30 social media tools for 2018. We will be updating this post throughout 2018, so if there are any tools you’d like added to the list, feel free to send us a message.

 

David Schneider

Dave is an author at Ninja Outreach and has a passion for digital marketing and travel. You can find him at @ninjaoutreach and [email protected]